HM Land Registry and Registers of Scotland have announced that they are easing the terms for the use their INSPIRE spatial polygon datasets.
The change comes into effect from 1 July, when the datasets will be available under the Open Government Licence (OGL) needing only attribution and without commercial charges.
Land Registry said its INSPIRE polygon dataset will be available under the new terms from its new Use Land and Property Data Service, with RoS's data available from the ROS INSPIRE Download Service.
The organisations said the move will open up the data to much wider use across the public and private sectors and is expected to provide a boost to the UK property technology industry.
It provides details of over 23 million title extents, or boundaries of land, around Great Britain, based on the Ordnance Survey (OS) MasterMap Topography Layer.
Janet Egdell, accountable officer at Registers of Scotland (RoS), said: “By providing definitive data under an OGL licence we are opening up new and diverse opportunities for our spatial dataset that demonstrates our ongoing commitment to supporting innovation across the public and private sectors at this challenging time for the economy.”
Andrew Trigg, interim director of digital, data and technology at HM Land Registry, commented: “Alongside the Geospatial Commission, OS and RoS, we’ve been working to enable and encourage colleagues, companies and entrepreneurs to access and apply our data in novel and exciting ways.
“The first of July will certainly be a milestone to that end, and hopefully one which captures the imagination of everyone from app developers to analysts and helps to unlock the potential in the UK’s geospatial industry.”
New freedoms
Chris Chambers, Ordnance Survey head of Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PGSA), added: “We’re excited to see both HMLR and RoS make use of the new freedoms to publish more authoritative data under OGL, as provided by the PSGA.
“This announcement, aligned with the release of key identifiers UPRN (unique property reference number), USRN (unique street reference number) and TOIDs (topographic idenftifiers) with geometry, results in significantly more geospatial data being fully open for businesses and developers to use, free and without restrictions. We look forward to seeing the innovation that is stimulated due to these significant changes, and we will continue to work with PSGA members to support them in publishing more of their data under OGL terms.”
On 1 July Ordnance Survey will also be launching a new OS Data Hub portal, along with a series of APIs with up to £1,000 free use of premium data per calendar month, along with unlimited use of OS OpenData.
Image by Kkairri, CC BY 2.0 through flickr
